From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Basic Courtesy
Date: 26 Jul 92 22:21:33 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: SCA

Greetings to all, especially Tibor, from Angharad.  Let me give
this another try, because I'm apparently not getting through.

When I said that I was not sure that Stephen's response was
discourteous, I meant exactly that: _not_ that I thought his was
the most useful response, but that I thought the problem wasn't
lack of courtesy.

First, let me contextualize overall by explaining my view of what I
think Stephen was trying to do, based on the actual words he posted.  
I think Stephen's text supports an attempt to say the following:

     (1)  Filks detract from the quality of our events.
     (2)  Writing filks diverts creative energy from other efforts 
          that enrich our events.
     (3)  Posting filks both encourages others to detract from the
          quality of our events by performing them and to divert 
          their energy into activites at most unhelpful.
     (4)  On these grounds, both writing and posting filks should
          be discouraged.

I don't think he said it well.  But I don't think he said it 
_rudely_ either, just poorly.  And I see a lot of merit in the 
message, that is being overlooked in the haste to lay balm on 
Christian's stings.  If Christian was trying to do something 
good and useful, so was Stephen.  If Christian should be 
encouraged to do it better, so should Stephen.  If Christian 
should not be publicly stomped on in place of such encouragement, 
neither should Stephen.  The cases seem to me strongly parallel.

Tibor says,

> Angharad, I'm a little surprised.  Christian didn't recite his
> poem to you at an event: he posted it here, in this thoroughly
> modern forum, with due apologies for modern content.  What's
> wrong with that?

I didn't complain at what Christian did.  

I find most modern filks dull, but as far as I'm concerned, people 
are welcome to post them; I'll just skip them.  I am not upset with 
Christian: which is why I have not gone around repeating his name in 
what looks fair set to become a flame war.  I don't want to give
people nasty associations with it through what I say.

> I certainly took Stephen's meaning to be an attempt to humiliate
> Christian, but I also powdered that liberally with the knowledge
> that in this medium, who can tell?

Indeed, who _can_ tell?  Why did you assume that?  What Stephen
said was that Christian had demonstrated that filk had no place in
the SCA.  He clearly intended to discourage filking.  That is the 
_only_ clear intent in his posting.

> If Stephen meant to humiliate Christian, as it first appeared to
> me, then it was discourteous.  If it was a critique meant to be
> helpful, it failed somewhat, but the intent removes a lot of the
> sting.  Stephen has failed to enlighten us as to his intent. Do
> you (or anyone) know his intent?

No, I don't, and neither do you.  In the absence of any knowledge 
other than the intent to discourage filk provided by his text, I 
consider it less rude than unethical to attribute more pernicious 
intent.

Stephen communicated badly.  The proof is clear: his post made people 
identify with Christian's feelings, and that has completely obscured 
his explicit message, has made people hostile, and has made people 
run to the Christian's defense (and filking's) rather than consider 
whether we should be spending our creative energy -- which, at least 
in my case, is limited -- in writing things that at most have a place 
on the mundane fringes of what we do. 

That Stephen's _intent_ was to humiliate Christian -- as opposed to
discouraging what he had done -- is absolutely not clear.  I do
not think that the Rialto is entitled to make that assumption and
then publicly castigate him on it.

The claim that Stephen's act is rude on _any_ definition is supportable 
_only_ on the hypothesis that he acted with the primary intent to injure, 
or with the deliberate attitude the injury doesn't matter.  I believe
that neither of these hypotheses is currently supported, and that burden 
of proof lies on those who accuse, not those who are accused.

Intents live in cloud-cuckoo-land.  It is very tempting to assume
that whenever one person's actions hurt another, they do so by intent.
It is also, in most cases, just plain factually wrong.  A good rule
of thumb: never attribute malice to anyone on grounds less firm than
you would be willing to accept as justifiying a public attribution of 
malice against yourself.

Additionally, please consider that the complaints of rudeness and 
injury in this case primarily issue from the east coast, which is 
a heavily "garden-implement" dialect area.  Stephen is Ansteorran:
he belongs to a group that speaks some of the "deepest shovel" in 
the US.  The cultural environment in Ansteorra tends toward _far_ 
more direct speech than that in the East Realm (or generally on the 
east and west coasts).  An Ansteorran -- indeed, any mundane Texan 
-- who bruised as easily as many of us are wont to assume people do 
would long since have climbed into a teeny little shell and pulled 
it in after him.

Cultures vary.  The impact of a statement in one may be very different
from the impact of the same statement in another.  When judging the 
intent behind an utterance, one has to consider the projected impact
in _its_ cultural setting, not in one's own.  To do otherwise is at 
least as insensitive as anything Stephen may have done.

One final point:

> Now, when Christian recited this poem at a period poetry party
> recently, all of your arguments came true.  But, my words here
> are the first reference to that transgression that I'm aware
> of. 

No, but it was predictable, if not on Christian's part, then by 
another.  This is what I meant when I said,

>         This point loses some force because of the difference
> between performing it at an event and presenting it on the 
> Rialto: but few things are written with the intention of never
> being performed, and filk performances tend to go everywhere
> others do.

If the author didn't take it to inappropriate venues, by providing a
script, he -- deliberately or otherwise -- invited others to.  You say,

>      And, heck, the guy's proud of that work: and I'd just as
> soon encourage him to continue, moving in the direction of
> period work, as smack him with an ambivalent put down, as
> Stephen did.  Christian has promise.

This assumes that doing period work is a continuation of doing filk.
As someone who as done a little of both, I'm not convinced.  Further,
as I also said in my first posting, in Christian's place, I'd rather
have it assumed that I knew what I was doing was blatantly modern
and so out-of-place in our central activities, than have people think 
that somehow I didn't know that some people in the SCA were looking 
for a medieval atmosphere  -- even were I in my first months in the 
Society, which I don't think Christian is.

I agree that it is better to encourage people to improve than simply
to chastise them for doing inappropriate things.

I do not agree either that all such chastisement is automatically
rude or that ineffective communication is automatically the same as
malicious intent.

I also do not agree with the implication that what Stephen did to
Christian is all that different from what a number of you have since
done to Stephen.  If this is not reason for Stephen to continue as he
is doing, it is equally not reason for the rest of the world to continue
to return the favor.  And if your intents are all very constructive --
which I believe they are -- perhaps considering the impact of what you
are doing to him with those intents may help you get some insight into
the range of intents that could underlie what he said about Christian.

In Service to the Society,

-- Angharad/Terry