My side of the story

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I am not exactly inexperienced in polemic. However, the most recent one in which I have been involved - the Blaise Zabini kerfuffle - has taken a form I had not expected, and that I think requires me to state my side of the story.

When you bear in mind that because of my being thrown out of a couple of people's LJ, I do not even know half of what is going, this is inevitably a provisional account. I feel fairly sure that there are charges going around that I have not even heard about, let alone had a chance to answer. On the other hand, even disregarding the large number of people I answered harshly during the quarrel, I think there are a few of my own friends who may not be aware of the background of some of the events. One or two things are more or less unknown to anyone but myself and one or two people.

Like many other fans, I was fascinated by the name Blaise Zabini, and built up a personality on that name alone and a number of stories featuring the character. However, I took quite a liberty with the character - a sort of personal equivalent of the American transfer student cliche'. Knowing full well that a Blaise Zabini in Hogwarts had to be British-born, I nevertheless made him Italian, and placed him in what quickly became an AU.

A couple of years ago, I had a violent clash with a bunch of people who confused the male name "Blaise" with the female "Blaze" and insisted that a Blaise Zabini could be a girl. This was a particularly unpleasant encounter, which left me with a strong feeling that the people involved were pushing a cultural-imperialist agenda which involved their refusal to deal with any local cultural peculiarities - such as the existance of exclusively male names such as Blaise. Another point (which was repeatedly ignored by the people who responded to the f_w misreporting of my comments later on) was that the names "Blaise" and "Zabini" form a whole, reinforcing each other and pointing straight at Italian descent, however distant.

Blaise turned up unexpectedly in theregoresyamum's LJ. I made my points, and the discussion quickly became heated. I do not, now, recall the stages by which it reached the pitch of anger it did, and theregoresyamum has either deleted the entry or made it accessible to herself alone. Either way, even supposing that I stepped over the line in answering someone, I find myself unable to do anything about it. I can neither access the records nor place any appropriate apology there. (And when I see reason to apologize, I apologize in public, on principle.)

In view of the quick rise of temperature on this issue, I decided to move the debate to my own LJ, where I faced an onslaught of know-nothingism and bad manners fuelled by a vilely mendacious fandom_wank report. Now let me underline one thing: I moved the debate on to my blog, and deliberately drew the gathering answer to myself, out of respect to theregoresyamum. I did not want to leave the impression that she had done anything to sanction it, or that she was personally involved. I knew that she was in pain with a broken hip and living with an unsympathetic relative, and wished to spare her trouble.

One matter that had arisen during the debate was straussmonster. This is a person whom I regard as a creep of the first water, who has treated me abominably and insulted my native city, and whom I regard as altogether bad news. I had the displeasure of finding her on the thread, and took the opportunity to give a short account of the way she had behaved to me in the past. She whined - truth hurts - and gave me the opportunity to explain that I regarded her as not nice to know and that I would warn anyone against her. On this I have not changed my mind, and will not change my mind until I see evidence that she has any understanding of why I found her behaviour so heinous, let alone any apologies.

theregoresyamum's behaviour became odd and, to me, increasingly hard to understand, let alone follow. Vague rumours of complaints reached me, making me uneasy, while I was spending all my free time fending off the hostile commenters on my LJ, and, incidentally, coming to know nice people and making new friends. Then, after she had locked or deleted the entries, she wrote to me a strangely muted letter, hinting without clearly stating that I had offended a number of people. Among these, apparently, was one person who had previously refused my offer to friend her - something that never happened before or since - because apparently she considered me a brute. On a later occasion I found her acting brutally herself, and pointed it out. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? Not, it seems, in her eyes; she had not been able to forget and forgive, even though she had been the one who had as good as insulted me in the first place. (How would you feel if, on asking someone to let themselves be friended, you were answered that you were really too violent for her?)

I realize that with the ending of that previous paragraph I am opening myself to sarcastic answers about this person making the right choice, and so on. That is not my point. If you do not consider me a nice person, that is your affair. But it also means that you have placed yourself on an unfriendly footing; and if you find me less than impressed at your behaving in the very same way you charged me with, you are being illogical and unfair. That is the point.

In response to Gun's letter, I said quite clearly that I would never apologize to straussmonster for telling no more than the truth about her; as for the others, I explained that I could not remember what I had said. Instead of giving me an opportunity to see what I had done wrong (by then the thread was already unreachable), she seems to have taken this as a negative - which it was never intended to be, except for straussmonster - and defriended me with a long and whiny public entry.

In assessing this behaviour, I have to remind myself that theregoesyamum is quite young, in an unhappy situation, and in a great deal of physical pain. And what is more, she has been increasingly placing herself in a false and increasingly difficult position in fandom. Essentially, in the last several months, she has been cultivating an abrasive, confrontational, foul-mouthed image, looking for online notoriety, making highly sensible statements in a violent, vulgar and unsubtle manner. She seemed to ache for the position of fandom wolf's-head, and when an "I-hate-Gun" community was started, she declared herself delighted.

Now the position of fandom wolf's-head is something I know about. I have gained it without wanting it, and apparently without effort. It is not something I particularly fancy, and I have said many times that I would rather quietly discuss music or theology with people I agree with than have violent online confrontations with people who hate me, over what may well be non-issues. However, something about my character - my foul temper and inability to keep silent or suffer gladly what I regard as folly - more or less predisposes me to be a stormy petrel. I knew it when I named my LJ, and I accept the consequences.

And if I do not particularly like the position, even my enemies will agree that I am sufficiently suited for it. I am capable of answering dozens of hostile or neutral questions on the trot, I have a cultivated gift for invective, and while I dislike rows, I love debates. I am 43 and set in my ways, and I am used enough to these things as not to feel crushed by the weight of hostility and occasional genuine hate that reaches me from time to time; especially when I find that it comes from people whom I would not respect in the first place.

theregoresyamum fancied herself in a similar role, but I do not think she is. For one thing, she is much too young. It took me 43 years to get tough enough to bear the knowledge that some people hate me; for most people, the very thought is intolerable. And for weeks if not months before the Zabini row, theregoresyamum had been showing signs that the burden of it all was getting at her. It is one thing to fancy oneself as an all-in wrestler, and quite another to have to do it. Insults aimed at you are not funny.

I fancy that the Blaise row made her snap. At a time when she was suffering in her private life, and already feeling the burden of widespread hostility, why should she take the blast from yet another row that she had done nothing to start? The pressure and injustice of it all grew on her till she exploded, defriending me and blasting me from her own LJ.

The involvement of another person I find much harder to bear or forgive. If there is one thing that friend and foe know of me, it is that I have long been an enthusiast for kennahijja. I regard her as a genius, and, quite frankly, I have repeatedly let her get away with things I would neither have excused nor forgiven anyone else. On a couple of occasions, I quietly deleted phenomenally offensive or foolish comments from her rather than having to upbraid her in public. Where genius is concerned - and she is a genius - I am a bit of a sucker.

In particular, her intervention in the Zabini row was so insulting that if it had come from someone else, they would have been banned. She declared, and insisted even in front of my firm and angry denial, that my reason to write as I did was self-interest - because I have written stories about an Italian Blaise.

I will have to give credit to everyone else who commented, even the basest: nobody sank so low. This kind of "ascribing motive" is not only the same as calling my reasons to argue corrupt; it is the end of any kind of argument whatever. Once a person starts assuming that you are arguing for any reason except that you believe in the argument itself, the argument is dead. You cannot answer that your motives are honest love of argument, because that road has been closed. You cannot set up another argument, because your reasons to do so will always be under attack. The only thing you can do is recognize that every chance of debating rationally with this particular person has come to an end.

Once again, I quietly hid this enormity from kennahijja and reproached her in a strictly private form. And the next thing she did was to go over to theregoesyamum's whiny entry about me and metaphorically pat her on the back, saying there, there, I have had the same problem with this person, he is clearly unreformable - and taking bloody good care not to inform anyone that I had just tried to give her a private lesson in ethics. I find this behaviour monstrous.

This is where things stand as far as I am aware, at present. If these things were reckoned by numbers, I might console myself by saying that I lost two friends and found ten. But that is poor consolation. I am very glad of the various nice, fun and interesting people I met; and I am more than glad, I am grateful and awed, at the magnanimous and open way with which ani_bester has waved away some past issues between us and admitted that she was not wholly without blame. That is a truly lovely thing to come out of this row.

But I regret, deeply and unmixedly, the loss of Gun and Hijja as friends. A friend is not a modular part of your machine, that can be removed or changed according to need; she or he is a part of you, of your life and your experience, a part of your intimacy, of your mental home. They are people who help weave that sense of personal warmth and acceptance that does so much to make the difference between despair and happiness. They are things that increase what you are, what your experience is, what you live for. And inevitable though I think - especially in the case of Hijja - the final smash, I can never stop wishing that it could somehow have gone differently.

P.S.: I just made the kind of discovery that usually makes me explode with fury. There is an entry in theregoesyamum's journal dedicated to this matter. It is full of things addressed to me personally, in a nice reasonable tone. I have already answered a couple of points, but by chance, and without meaning to, I entered the answers as anonymous. I went there today, intending to post a couple of points in my own name - and found that the whole nice reasonable screed, addressed to me and apparently expecting an answer from me, was f-locked against me.

Now I hope that Gun just did that at the start when she was angry, and forgot about it. Because otherwise all those professions of wishing things to end for the best would amount to the grossest kind of hypocrisy. Yes, I know that I can always answer as Anonymous, like all the people I banned from my LJ lurk and write in from time to time; but I am afraid that my self-respect will not let me do that. The first time was a mistake; there will be no second time. I will answer as myself, or not at all.

Comments

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Not after I had said no in so many words. To go back to it after that is as good as to call me either a liar or deluded. And apart from the further assault on the very possibility of further discussion - since nobody of sense would discuss anything with a deluded person or a conscious liar - that is plain bad manners.

[mincot.livejournal.com]

Actual, intended, personal attack *is* rude, and I don't tolerate that at all. However, I disagree that maintaining a difference of opinion about the underlying assumptions of an argument necessarily constitutes such an attack. Now, please bear in mind that what I am saying here is general, and not meant to imply that *in this particular case* either yours or Hija's point was "right" or "wrong". I am arguing that Hija's position is plausible and not necessarily an attack on your veracity or mental state.

Remember my neighbours, the ones who say they are not racist yet make racist comments? In seeing the gap between their statements about their beliefs and their comments, I am neither calling them liars nor deluded. They are most certainly not lying *from their perspective;* their mental categories are able to encompass both statements and not see them as contradictory. Because of that perspective, they are not deluded, either, or stupid (well, one neighbour is as dumb as the proverbial post, but I don't base that assumption on this incident). They are working from a different set of assumptions about racism, one in which "racism" means "hating / subordinating all ethnicities, even when you know them personally." In their definition, if they have black friends and co-workers, they can still generalize negatively about a group without being in their terms racist. Now, obviously, I disagree with that definition of racism, so I can still see their statements as embodying covert racism without seeing my neighbours as stupid, deluded, or mendacious.

A similar example --- when I teach premodern European history, someone of my students inevitably wants to repeat the old canard about "This was the period when the Church ruled, so people were ignorant, superstitious, irrational, and oppressed." Once we have disposed of the "Church ruling" issue in terms of politics, and introducting the idea of authority mediated and negotiated through various major players, we can then move on to definitions. Placing matters of faith above the economics of advancement is incomprehensible to my students, even the ones who will not do *anything* their pastors don't approve of (I teach in the Bible Belt). Left to themselves, medieval people would have acted just like modern capitalists, and because they did not, they therefore must have been "stupid" or "deluded" or oppressed by a Plot by the EEEVIL Catholic Church (which the students don't understand was not "The Catholic Church" at this point). So I spend a lot of time on the ways in which the medival world view compares with the modern view--where people are fundamentally similar (yes, one works toward one's own interests) and different (more identification of personal interest with community interests, an "economy of salvation"--if you think miracles CAN happen, and that the spiritual Otherworld is fairly close at hand, you invest more in THAT than in this world (and my Babptist students who tithe 10 and sometimes 20% of a LOW income start getting it at this point), a firm sence of "place" within a hierarchy, a sense of "just prices" that remain stable instead of charging what the market will bear, etc.) Once students start grasping the assumptions behind a world view, they no longer think that the people who held that view were stupid or deluded or victims of a highly improbable Plot. Instead, they were shaped by a different world view, one in which assumptions were often quite different from the ones the students hold. NOw,t he students still don't rush out to embrace the medieval world-view as their own. They understand, and still hold a different set of assumptions.

My point, therefore, is that I can imagine that Hija and you will hold different ideas about what your statement meant, and that maintaining a difference of opinion does not necessarily have the corollary that you OR Hija are lying, delusional, stubborn, mean-spirited, or unethical. You are working from different assumptions about the meaning of your statements. You may find, on consideration, that one or both of you does have a point, or you may say, we think differently, so let's agree to disagree and move on.

[mincot.livejournal.com]

Now, active rudeness is another matter--name calling, saying directly that "X is a stupid SOB" or "Yo mamma was a poodle with only two brain cells" or "You've obviously got donkey genes rather than human ones" or "Where was it you keep your brain again, because it isn't in your head" IS rude, if said seriously. However, the latter three can all ALSO be rhetorically funny--I've issued formal statements about my sister's ancestry when we were playing board games, and was meant, as I intended, with general laughter (oddly enough, as I share her ancestry ... ;) :) ) This style of joking is harder to do on the Internet, because the tone of voice does not come across and it is easier to take such statements as serious ones, but I have seen it done well.

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My point is that I have excused Hijja a lot. Too much.

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You mean like the difference where she would forbid Christians from taking part in politics?

[mincot.livejournal.com]

Several points on this issue.

1) The basic idea of most medieval religious teaching on the relationship of individuals to political or governmental involvement was, following Augustine, that human activity solely for its own sake--that following the City of Man--should be avoided. However, the city of God needed earthly governance, and there were just governments. This attitude of course presupposes the idea that government will remain consonant with and not undermine or attack religious doctrine. In 1890, Leo XIII summed up his statement by saying that "These precepts contain the abiding principle by which every Catholic should shape his conduct in regard to public life. In short, where the Church does not forbid taking part in public affairs, it is fit and proper to give support to men of acknowledged worth, and who pledge themselves to deserve well in the Catholic cause, and on no account may it be allowed to prefer to them any such individuals as are hostile to religion." However, then the issue became whether a government, and hence political involvement, supported Christian doctrine. The lines between secular and religious powers were much more fluid than they are today, a situation aided by the increasingly local character of rule through the early eleventh century. Secular rulers such as Charlemagne acted as guardian of the church, making rules for clerics; bishops could and did act as secular lords and governed whole territories, entire churches could be and were part of a local ruler's privileges, including the appointment of the priest or bishop. So a ruler's conception of adhering to doctrine and a cleric's might be similar--or very different.

Obviously there were attempts to clarify the situation. Ambrose's ability to enforce Theodosius' penance, the development of the monastery of Cluny, the Investiture Controversy, the Papal Inquisition, and the papacy of Innocent III all were high water marks in claiming the primacy of clerical authority. Charlemagn'es rule and coronation, the settlement of the Investiture Controversy (particularly in England), and the rule of Philip Augustus of France were all indicative of the primacy of secular governments. (A similar issue: clerics were forbidden to shed blood in battle, so they carried no edged weapons; both Cuthbert and Odo of Bayeux wielded lethal shillelaghs.)

2) As a result, one sees a vast disjuncture between practice and prescription. What clerics said and claimed was not necessarily what people actually did. Innocent III, perhaps the most powerful of the medieval popes, could not bring Philip Augustus to heel over his remarriage to Agnes of Meran, although he could force John of England to come to terms and to offer England as a papal fief. Despite the Papal Inquisition, the Cathars continued to dominate southern France until the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), a military expedition.

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Sir, you speak without the book. Or, in this case, without the knowledge of what it was about. You have made a great deal of effort on answer every word of which is strictly irrelevant to the matter at hand. Reflections on Combes, or Stalin, or Plutarco Calles, would have been more to the point.

[mincot.livejournal.com]

This brings up a third point. The coercive power of the Church throughout most of the Middle Ages has been vastly overrated. It certainly had a great deal of moral force, but as an institution it still had trouble establishing control over its own members, let alone the rest of society, in part because of the tangle of roles and jurisdictions I mentioned above. In the Investiture Controversy, for example, Gregory VII claimed that bishops were subordinate to the Pope, not the Holy roman Emperor. Yet in the conflict the German bishops sided with the Emperor, not Gregory. Gradually Rome built up institutional procedures for all churches--canon law, appeals to Rome, lines of authority--and tried to dissolve the bonds of "national" churches. By the thirteenth century much of this mechanism was in place, and one can properly begin speaking of The Church as opposed to Christian Churches--but, again, see the failures to establish complete superiority. For every Peter Abelard who was disciplined, there was a Marsiglio of Padua or a low-level heretic who was not. Power in the Middle Ages--including religious power--was always mediated and negotiated.

4) That said, clerical authority could be quite strong. Most medieval Europeans (assuming that one can even talk about "Europe" as opposed to "Castile" or "Burgundy" or "France", which, according to Robert Bartlett, was a concept that really began to take hold only in the thirteenth century) operated within a Christian framework, however vaguely understood, and accepted some form of Christianity. They might accept dogs as saints, and they might tenaceously defend their privileges against those of clerics, but they still accepted a Christian world-view. There were great outwellings of popular piety, and Christianity was interwoven into the daily fabric of life. But accepting that daily fabric and asking "how high?" when a cleric commanded them to jump were two different things (particularly when there were differences among clerics).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you said nothing that I did not know and little I had not argued in writing against the common nonsense about "medievalism".

[mincot.livejournal.com]

But "excusing" seems to me to be grasping the wrong end of the stick here, at least as regards my argument, because it implies that your stance is correct and patently obvious, while his /hers is not. Now, again, I don't know the whole story, so I am resolutely avoiding saying who is right here and who is wrong. I am also NOT saying that if there was genuine rudeness on either of your parts that the other party does not have the right to be angry and hurt, or feel whatever other feelings there may be. Neither am I saying that there is no such thing as a wrong argument. There are: there can also be a moral component to taking a specific stance. However, what that moral component is, and attached to what stance, is not absolute -- it is governed by time and culture, experience and training. Therefore, what I am saying is that from the outside, regardless of who is "right" or "wrong", both arguments are plausible and rational, and neither needs to be *excused*. Difference just has to be lived with. ;)