morgan_dhu | Where do our values come from, anyway?

Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?

Last night, I was talking with my partner

glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal,

bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.

So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.

But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.

Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.

So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.

And how about you?

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For me, as a child and a teenager, books had the power to expand my sense of what was possible: they took me far outside the narrow confines of suburban London and my fundamentalist Christian family. I certainly took values from them. For instance, the story of Beowulf made a huge impression on me; I decided that the important thing was not survival, but always fighting back, however terrifying one's adversary. But when the values expressed in books didn't make sense in terms of my own experience, I rejected them. In my early teens I enjoyed John Buchan's adventure stories. But I rejected the explicit anti-semitism in some of those stories; growing up in north-west London, I came into contact with Jewish people all the time. My closest friend at school was half Jewish. Buchan's anti-semitism didn't even make me angry (though it does now); I dismissed it as simply stupid.

I was an angry, rebellious kid; one of my strengths, as I now think. At twelve I was arguing with my father over his sexist attitudes, which for him were enjoined by the Bible. Again, I think the deciding factor for me was that male superiority didn't make sense in terms of my own experience. I knew I was cleverer and more capable than most of the males I encountered!

I have no doubt that having a bolshie, critical outlook helped me survive the experience of recognising that I was gay, in what was then a pretty hostile cultural environment. Books helped; oddly enough, the passage from Sword at Sunset you cite was one of the first positive depictions of a gay relationship that I ever met with. This was back when I was about thirteen. I didn't begin to identify as gay until several years later.

On the other hand, coming out as gay reinforced my sense of being an outsider, made me more inclined to identify with outsiders and outsider figures, and more inclined to be critical of conventional social values and sceptical about what I was told by those who claimed to be authorities.

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.

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?

I strongly suspect you would have been a radical anyway. What you would not have had was the theory behind it and the support of knowing how many other people felt the same way you did.

I say that in part because you said you were a rebellious child anyway (though I don't quite see how you could have been that and not angry, but anyway) and in part because I think if I had read those different books you mention, however much I might have been influenced by the arguments those theorists used, in practice I would have hated the regimentation and conformity that goes along with the fundamentalist world-view.

It's hard to think of myself not being a radical, but then, just how does one think of one's self as someone else?

About the "rebellious but not angry" thing - maybe rebellious isn't the right word. I simply never really wanted to do what everyone else was doing, or to do what adults expected me to do. So when I could avoid doing those things, I did.

I had some flat-out confrontations with adults, mostly about things that seemed just plain stupid (why can't I wear pants to school, why can't a girl grow up to be an astronaut, why do I have to take a nap in kindergarten when I never do at home, why do I have to do X, Y, or Z?), but my recollection of myself isn't of being angry, more of being totally bewildered.

That still happens, by the way. The bewilderment at various kinds of human behaviour often comes first, and then I get angry once I figure out the nastiness that's often behind whatever I've been bewildered by.

Where do our values come from, anyway?

Books and Values

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Re: Books and Values

Re: Books and Values