From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Withdrawal from the Rialto
Date: 30 Jul 92 00:23:19 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: SCA

Unto the good gentles of the RIalto does Hossein Ali Qomi send greetings and
prayers for the blessings of Allah.

I return to this forum, for a moment, perhaps, at the urging of many whom I
account good friends and to whom I have an obligation of honor and respect.
My intention is to explain my decision to withdraw.  

My outburst regarding the "shove it up your ass" posting was only the
proximate cause of my decision.  It only reflects something more
deeply disturbing.  It was not a fit of pique or a retreat from embarrassment
or temptation.

What more deeply disturbs me is that there does appear to be a 
fundamental clash of cultures in this forum and a clash in which the
minoritarian view is not afforded much tolerance, despite the claims of the
majoritarian view to be absolutely tolerant.

Please bear with me, for a moment, while I wax philosophical.

The dominant culture of the Rialto is lodged in a situational ethic; it is
fundamentally morally relativist.  The discussion over the truth-functionality
of beliefs makes this clear. In practical terms what many people seem to
be saying is that we must be tolerant of all beliefs, because we cannot
ultimately know the truth or because all beliefs are just individual
preferences, but that any belief which isn't so tolerant shouldn't be
tolerated.  I see a truly pernicious contradiction here.

Franz Yoder's remarks on the need for specific evaluators for belief statements
to be truth functional are very to the point.  That is certainly the view
of the Anglo-American analytical tradition.  However, what it ultimately
means is that a belief can only be "true" for the believer.  The real issue
is the _choice_ of evaluators, and the morally and epistemically relativist
position leaves no rational basis for the choice.

_All_ knowledge is grounded in belief.  What people commonly call "facts"
are simply shared beliefs, disbelief of which seems to call into question
unquestionable beliefs.  For example, no one can _prove_ the reality of
the external world, but disbelieving that my wife is real (or anyone else
with whom I converse) seems as pointless as disbelieving that my leg is
real.  We commonly employ such beliefs (and not all of them are so nearly
straightfoward or apparently trivial as the belief in the reality of the
external world -- take Kant's categories, for example) to choose what of
our sensory evidence to regard as facts.  Beliefs validate facts, not facts
beliefs in any ultimate epistemological sense.  The choice to believe that
there is an epistemically privileged reality "out there" is at least as
valid as the choice to disbelieve it.

This epistemological argument holds equally in ethical questions.  All
ethical choice is validated by belief.  Some argue that the inability to
know _certainly_ that a belief is true is a good reason to tolerate all
beliefs: this seems to be the basis for situational ethics and moral
relativism.  But that is just one choice.  It is equally possible that
there is an objective, moral reality, which exists whether we can prove it
with certainty or not (i.e., if it exists it is truth-functional, whether
we have instruments capable of measuring it or not).  I think that the
assumption of such an objective, moral reality is as essential to moral
action as the assumption that there is an objective, empirical reality is
to knowing.  This makes me less tolerant than many people who think that
there is no objective, moral reality.  However, they have no greater claim
to certainty about their moral relativism than I about my absolutism.  We
are both making choices.

The reason that I raise these philosophical questions is that I think that
the cultural differences on the Rialto aren't just linguistic, dialect 
differences.  I think there are also important epistemological and ethical
differences.

My response to the coincidence of email from Dafydd ap Gwystl and the
posting by Dafydd not-ap-Gwystl (I don't have the name in front of me, my
apologies) is illustrative of the problem.  I come from a culture where
telling someone to "get fucked" or to "shove your opinions up your ass" are
_fighting_ words.  In that culture nobody who doesn't want a fight says
things like that.  And anyone who does say them, says them with the expectation
that the shit's going to hit the fan.  The same thing is true for acts of
treachery, or calling someone a liar -- they hit the hottest hot-buttons
available.  

If someone said these things to my face, and I had any salient 
reason to believe that he wasn't joking, I'd pop him in the mouth.  It
wouldn't be a conscious choice; it's more like an autonomic response.  The
situation gets hotter still if it's my lady to whom someone says something
like that -- it's a guarantee (not a threat, more like just the way the
world works) that he's in a shit-load of trouble unless someone pulls me
off.  I lived for many years in the Middle East, where I learned very
quickly that saying direct, personally abusive things about another's
person or family can get you very dead very quickly.  The situation in Texas,
where I spent several years, isn't all that different, although such
behavior is more likely to result in injury than death in that culture.  I
don't say that sort of thing to someone unless I'm absolutely convinced that
it's necessary and I'm willing to take the consequences.  

When people get abusive on the Rialto the usual response is "I wasn't 
talking about _you_, I was talking about a category in general."  Where I 
come from, you don't say abusive things about empty categories, and if you 
say them to me, or if anyone who hears it could reasonably think that you
are putting me in that category, as far as someone from my culture is
concerned, you just said it about me, and the fight's on.  

These cultural phenomena aren't accidental.  They are lodged in a very 
specific moral code which is rather more absolutist than relativist.

All this is not to say that the culture from which I operate doesn't
relish argument.  Hell, it _thrives_ on it -- but there are clear lines
delineating acceptable from unacceptable.  Telling me "you're full of
shit" -- meaning that I'm mistaken, not lying -- is perfectly acceptable;
telling me to shove my opinions up my ass isn't.  Telling me that my "ideas
are fucked" is fine; telling me to get fucked isn't.  In cultures where
blunt speech is commonplace, well defined lines are necessary to avoid
mayhem.  It's why I knew from the first that Stephen wasn't personally
attacking Christian or criticizing his filk as filk.  Stephen's a Texan,
and a friend of mine, we share a common culture: I _know_ what he would have
said if he meant to attack Christian personally, and it wouldn't have been
anywhere near that nice.  At worst (or best, depending on your culture),
Stephen was trying to start an argument (which people in our culture positively
enjoy), not to start a fight (which we especially try by and large to avoid,
since we won't just get yelled at, we can get _hurt_).
 
The problem is that whenever people from my culture or its analogues act
from what we believe to be perfectly courteous, well-defined rules of
argumentation, a sizeable portion of the Rialto thinks it's time for
tactical nukes.  Trust me, most of us have been trying very hard to meet
you, but you don't seem either to recognize our efforts or to be trying very 
hard to meet us.  Toleration seems often to be a very one-way street.  I 
simply don't see a solution.  I'm neither mad nor embarrassed, I'm
utterly frustrated.

What makes the problem even more pernicious is that I think that the values
of my culture are significantly closer to those of the medieval European
aristocracy than those of the dominant Rialto culture.  I'm not in the
SCA just because it's an amusing game.  I'm in the SCA because the value
system which we profess to be trying to recreate resonnates deeply with
my mundane values.  I think that this is far more true for the SCA at large
than for the Rialto.  It deeply disturbs me that people who genuinely hold
medieval values in their _real_ lives find it easier going in the SCA
generally than on the Rialto.

I'm not going away mad; I'm not hiding because I'm embarrassed as hell 
(frankly, it may disturb some people, but if the same set of circumstances
with the same information set happened tomorrow, I don't see a damned
reason to do anything differently -- the failing was informational, not
a failure of principle).  I'm going away because I hit a rock-solid wall
and I don't think I know how to breach it.  It's not a question of honor
in the sense that I soiled my copybook, it's a question of honor in that
I don't think it's honorable to try to coerce people into accomodating my
values.

I ultimately think that Alexander and Sam'l are right: there are things on
which we simply have to agree to disagree.  I just don't think that that's
a widely shared opinion.

I am willing to discuss this matter further in email.  If someone can
change my mind, I'm willing to listen.  But I said that I was going to do
something, and that counts for a lot in my culture.

Best Wishes,

Hossein Ali Qomi/Gregory F. Rose
From: Tim@f4229.n124.z1.fidonet.org (Tim)
Sender: FredGate@ocitor.fidonet