I was rebellious but not angry - a rather odd combination, I've found. I thing that growing up in an environment in which my mother could be very supportive of me one moment and violently abusive the next made me distrust all authority, something that remains pretty true even today. I knew you couldn't reject it completely, becasue there was some good, but I also knew that authority could be capricious, illogical and unreasonable.
So I simply didn't accept anything on face value. An authority has to earn my personal respect, they're not going to get it just because they have a degree, a title, a position, experience, whatever.
I'm also pretty sure that reading *a lot* of books had a great deal to do with it - I was certainly exposed to a vast range of human possibilities, and they certainly did not all agree with each other. I just wonder, sometimes, if I'd read different books, would I now be a closeted, xenophobic, fundamentalist Christian with a highly conservative worldview, or would I have come out a radical anyway?
It's interesting that you recall the passage from Sword at Sunset - I didn't, until I read it again. But then it dawned on me that there had probably been a lot of queer or gay-positive material going on, and not always in the background, of a lot of what I was reading at the time (from Mary Renault to Samuel Delany) and I hadn't registered it becasue it simply seemed right for it to be there.
The first depiction of queer sexuality in science fiction/fantasy that really struck me in a memorable fashion was in Diane Duane's Door into Fire, which I read much, much later - and that was because bisexuality was pretty much the norm in her created society, which enabled me to say "aha, that's what I've been saying about myself, this is how it works for me, I'm not crazy or fooling myself or being a political lesbian or exhibiting internalised homophobia, there can be something that works like this for some people."
And considering that both you and rainbow_goddess, who are the only commenters so far, are, like me, not straight, it also adds another level of thought to the question I posed, which is how much might early, maybe even unconscious, thoughts/feelings/ideas about being different in terms of sexual identity, affect the process of forming one's values.
I know, I'm really revisiting the whole nature vs. nurture argument at one level, and it has always seemed to me that it's not just that both influence, but also that they degree of influence each has may be dependent on the individual nature and the individual nurture we're talking about.
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branchandroot
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-08-18 11:13 pm (UTC)So I simply didn't accept anything on face value. An authority has to earn my personal respect, they're not going to get it just because they have a degree, a title, a position, experience, whatever.
I'm also pretty sure that reading *a lot* of books had a great deal to do with it - I was certainly exposed to a vast range of human possibilities, and they certainly did not all agree with each other. I just wonder, sometimes, if I'd read different books, would I now be a closeted, xenophobic, fundamentalist Christian with a highly conservative worldview, or would I have come out a radical anyway?
It's interesting that you recall the passage from Sword at Sunset - I didn't, until I read it again. But then it dawned on me that there had probably been a lot of queer or gay-positive material going on, and not always in the background, of a lot of what I was reading at the time (from Mary Renault to Samuel Delany) and I hadn't registered it becasue it simply seemed right for it to be there.
The first depiction of queer sexuality in science fiction/fantasy that really struck me in a memorable fashion was in Diane Duane's Door into Fire, which I read much, much later - and that was because bisexuality was pretty much the norm in her created society, which enabled me to say "aha, that's what I've been saying about myself, this is how it works for me, I'm not crazy or fooling myself or being a political lesbian or exhibiting internalised homophobia, there can be something that works like this for some people."
And considering that both you and
I know, I'm really revisiting the whole nature vs. nurture argument at one level, and it has always seemed to me that it's not just that both influence, but also that they degree of influence each has may be dependent on the individual nature and the individual nurture we're talking about.